Perch Fishing-Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)

Pickrel Perch

Perch Fishing

On the far hill the cloud of thunder grew

And sunlight blurred below; but sultry blue

Burned yet on the valley water where it hoards

Behind the miller's elmen floodgate boards,

And there the wasps, that lodge them ill-concealed

In the vole's empty house, still drove afield

To plunder touchwood from old crippled trees

And build their young ones their hutched nurseries;

Still creaked the grasshoppers' rasping unison

Nor had the whisper through the tansies run

Nor weather-wisest bird gone home.

How then

Should wry eels in the pebbled shallows ken

Lightning coming? troubled up they stole

To the deep-shadowed sullen water-hole,

Among whose warty snags the quaint perch lair.

As cunning stole the boy to angle there,

Muffling least tread, with no noise balancing through

The hangdog alder-boughs his bright bamboo.

Down plumbed the shuttled ledger, and the quill

On the quicksilver water lay dead still.

A sharp snatch, swirling to-fro of the line,

He's lost, he's won, with splash and scuffling shine

Past the low-lapping brandy-flowers drawn in,

The ogling hunchback perch with needled fin.

And there beside him one as large as he,

Following his hooked mate, careless who shall see

Or what befall him, close and closer yet —

The startled boy might take him in his net

That folds the other.

Slow, while on the clay,

The other flounces, slow he sinks away.

What agony usurps that watery brain

For comradeship of twenty summers slain,

For such delights below the flashing weir

And up the sluice-cut, playing buccaneer

Among the minnows; lolling in hot sun

When bathing vagabonds had drest and done;

Rootling in salty flannel-weed for meal

And river shrimps, when hushed the trundling wheel;

Snapping the dapping moth, and with new wonder

Prowling through old drowned barges falling asunder.

And O a thousand things the whole year through

They did together, never more to do

--Edmund Blunden.